Missing my Motor

A few weeks back, two of my friends and I journeyed north to Providence for the long holiday weekend, to visit our dear mutual friend Rebecca. A quaint and occasionally troubling hybrid between college town and depressed rust-belt city, I have enjoyed exploring the cultural nuances and, naturally, having the opportunity to spend time with one of my closest friends over the past few years, a time or two.   

As has been true and steadfast these past few months, the winter weather was brutal. Braving the cold winds in the city, I caught a bus amid the flotsam and jetsam of Port Authority, which tore up the highway, racing against the threat of snow and ice. Just as the storm really began to roar, gained sufficient momentum and snarled with whips of snow, I arrived, safely and on time, to a warm apartment, stocked with five bottles of red wine and a group of beautiful people. Unsurprisingly, those five bottles dissipated over the afternoon and evening hours, imbibed during a fiercely competitive round of Risk and a gorging of lamb with roasted winter vegetables.

Thankfully, both legs of my trip, up north and back home, were relatively easy-going, the bus not uncomfortably packed, the hours of slowly rocking back and forth easily spent with my nose buried in Ancient Evenings. Even with this quiet, devoted, precious time to reading this weighty novel, I am still wading through the meandering, mystic text, simultaneously relishing in and struggling with the reliance on mythology, the labyrinthine narration, turning corners, twisting through pyrimidine pathways into the past.

Since moving to the city, spending my time traveling actually reading, in fact, on public transportation, rather than concentrating on traffic, gripping various books rather than gripping my steering wheel, I have not often contemplated or mourned the loss of my car, a pale silver Honda Accord, a classic from a decade passed, abandoned to the idles of my parent's driveway. Fueled by my pragmatic parents and my own lack of fervent determination to be behind the wheel, I did not earn my license until seventeen. I have never been on a legitimate road trip. I have never succumbed to the sultry beckoning of the open road, wind in your hair attitude. Since that weekend escape, however, I have been feeling restless, feeling that longing, that unbridled freedom to just roam, easily. To just get in and go. To be able to flee the confines of this concrete jungle without buying a ticket, adhering to a schedule. To satisfy a sort of Americana hunger for horizons, a hunger cultivated and heavily marketed to, but a hunger that I admit openly, unabashedly. 

With parking posing such an issue in most cities, perhaps the solution to this lust would be a motorcycle. Something sleek, something dangerous, something somehow absurdly practical.

(image taken from The Pursuit Aesthetic)